A LITTLE COVE, SOMEWHERE ON THE WEST SIDE OF ST. LUCIA
I had heard of this small, independent country, and could even put my thumb on our globe and darken the skies over St. Lucia (pronounced: Saint Loo-shuh) and a few nearby countries all at the same time. St. Lucia isn’t big, and I had never paid it much mind. And now I’m there, on a 42-foot catamaran, typing away on my computer as I enjoy the gentle rolling of the Caribbean in the small harbor called Marigot Bay.
It sounds so romantic to be cruising south where you can observe the kite-shaped constellation of the Southern Cross and where the north star, Polaris, is lazily resting on a nearby ridge instead of hoisting itself up were it can be easily seen as it does for me at home. This is an especially delightful trip if you like the sea-faring life. I have always slept soundly aboard a boat; the rocking lulls me to sleep. I would be doing so right now if it weren’t for the persistent, 85-degree, 85-percent-humidity climate. Some nights the temperature drops down to 77. That would be a scorcher back in Pacifica. I must be a Pacifican to the bone, because this heat repels me, keeps me awake, makes me lethargic, and keeps my clothes damp. I’m always asking someone else to hand me things instead of getting up myself as I would at home.
The Caribbean is not my first choice for a vacation place. Probably not even 139th. You could say that I’d been dragged here, kicking and screaming, against my will. You could say that, but it wouldn’t be exactly true, at least as a physical description. But it represents my mental state pretty well. The first night we stayed in a room in Marigot Bay. The lawn outside was pockmarked with thousands of golf-ball-sized holes, made by small red lawn crabs that you could see guarding their burrows in the morning and evening. Our party of seven consisted of myself, my wife, our three children (7, 11, 15), and my wife’s parents. The kids were delighted when a small chameleon made its appearance on the wall of our room. Fortunately, we all like small critters (that don’t bite).
There have been some very pleasant moments on this trip, moments that I will try always to remember (as I try to forget the rest). To name one, they have the green flash here, just as in Pacifica; that’s when the sun, for the instant before it ducks below the horizon, blazes the green-blue color of old copper left out in salt air. And I did go snorkeling. Snorkeling consists of putting on an ill-fitting mask that leaves funny red marks on your face; biting down on a foul-tasting rubber snorkel that delights you with occasional mouthfuls of salt water instead of letting you breathe plain old air; and swimming face-down in the water, where I supposed I would see rocks and old car tires. While on shore, we engaged in another island pleasure: watching billionaires coming in and out on huge yachts that escaped from James Bond movies. Some of the villages in which we stopped were so small and poor that the big ships never sully their anchor chains near them: In such places, we were the rich nabobs being observed.
The GPS put precision on the feeling of distance: we were 4082 miles from home. The Caribbean islands are places where the threats are sunburn and indolence, unlike Pacifica where boaters risk a quick death by hypothermia from falling into the sea. The water is warm (like everything else) and, to my amazement, those striped yellow and blue fish you see in every underwater film shown on Public Television are really there. Well trained, too: They don’t run away as you glide over them. The water is incredibly clear; you can see the bottom 2 fathoms (12 feet) below as if through a glass window. Though I had never done it before, using fins was so natural as to amaze me. I turned and glided, flying over the bottom without conscious effort; perhaps something in me has not forgotten the time when we were all fish. With my arms at my sides, wearing a special SPF 30 sunburn-proof shirt (at least I was told it was sunburn proof), I felt like a scion of Jacques Cousteau as I threaded my way among the boulders and sponges. A squadron of three cuttlefish slipped into position under me and stopped right in front of my faceplate. They move so mysteriously and precisely, and have such a futuristic shape, that you’d think you’re watching something from Star Wars. The last time I saw this many fish so close together was when I was peering into an aquarium. Here, I was one of the fishies, and there was no room for sarcasm or disappointment: snorkeling was a joy.
Part Two
ON THE BOUNDING MAIN
While I don’t mind a few hours out fishing or a short day sail, I don’t know about this business of living on a boat. For some it is a joy, for me it is somewhere between a nuisance and a terror. For example, instead of bathrooms, boats have heads. The ones on the boat we’d chartered were either created by a sadist or were brilliantly designed for some other species. They make the bathrooms on a short-haul airliner seem commodious.
To keep the vessel water-tight, the windows (oops, ports) are miniscule and the tiny cabins become ovens, heating up in the tropical sun all day, and finally becoming cool enough to sleep in by morning, when it’s time to get up. The cabin I stayed in has a bed that is also a hatch to the engine compartment, and the smell of diesel fuel hung about at all times, making going to sleep that much harder. No doubt the experience also increased my risk of getting cancer by 52%. The mattresses are at most an inch thick, laid on a bed of firm, snug, 13-layer 3/4-inch, inflexible marine plywood.
I don’t know much about boats, but I do know that they can sink. This seems to be a singularly unpleasant idea, and while riding in my car is probably more dangerous, it doesn’t seem wise to encumber a vacation with this wet, unthrilling prospect. I am not a particularly good swimmer, especially when I am asleep. Before embarking, I sat in on the briefing for captains, where the particular perils and hazards of the waters we were about to traverse were set out in infinite detail. The captain of our boat didn’t even take notes, while I hastily scribbled the (radio) channels to use for emergencies, which (water) channels were marked and which didn’t, as yet, have proper buoys. The essential weather briefings, we were told, are broadcast at only four times during the day on a certain frequency, however, my radio rarely succeeded in finding these mythical reports. And this is a radio that can hear anything from local AM rock stations, through short wave, FM and TV sound channels, airplanes, and up into police and even satellite communications frequencies. It’s a super radio. It can hear anything except these weather reports. This is because, as Captain David Phillips explained to us at the briefing, nothing was as important as keeping abreast of the unpredictable and rapidly changing weather in the islands.
The weather has been exactly the same every day so far.
It is hard to put into words the joy of cruising at 6 knots (I can run faster than that or, at least, I used to be able to run faster than that) over vast stretches of warm, salty water. The calm seas present a nearly unchanging travel-brochure-blue expanse, punctuated by picturesque islands full of poisonous snakes and biting insects. Not to mention local inhabitants who offer you a carved shingle or a locally-made T-shirt showing the islands, scattered in a rough curving line that divides the Atlantic ocean from the Caribbean sea, "This shirt accurate enough to navigate with in an emergency, sah". Friendliness on the water is customary here. As you approach any little village with an anchorage, smiling boat-boys (that’s what they call themselves) in outboard-powered dories, unafraid of your large catamaran, come right up and board uninvited. You wave, say hello, exchange names, and repeat, "I’m sorry, even at $15EC (Eastern Caribbean dollars), which I’m sure is a bargain, I don’t need one. Thank you."
The genocide practiced by the early Spanish, English, and French "discoverers" of these islands can never be condoned, but after you’ve been offered your nineteenth useless carving, you can at least understand why they might have been a mite annoyed at the natives. Why the Europeans would want to own these places is less clear.
To tell the truth, these local vendors are not very pushy (pushy, just not very pushy), and actually are rather pleasant. This isn’t New York or San Francisco. Strangely, we ran across a lot of oddly familiar and unusual names. The telecommunications officer in Casties, capital of St. Lucia, is Perry Mason. The man who came out to fix our bilge pumps was Glen Miller. A local travel agent is Debbie Reynolds. Then there are the names painted boldly on the sides of the local taxi boats. For example: L’eclair, Nevertheless, Why Knot, ShackAttack, Freedom, No Way, Just in Time, Fever, Go With The Flow, Jabberwock, Yot, and, my favorite, I Don’t Fraid Now.
A few paragraphs ago I said that it was hard to put into words the joys of sailing, actually, it needs but one word: boring. I know I have just offended every sailor who reads this, and I must admit that they should be allowed to ride their hobbyhorses off into tropical sunsets as often as they wish, but this is fair warning not to assume that everybody else will enjoy it for more than 15 minutes. Less, if they are subject to getting seasick. Perhaps I have been put on this boat to remind me to avoid trying to drag everybody into my hobbies, one of which consists of reading lots of math books and thinking through delightful mathematical problems. Imagine if I suggested that for our next vacation together, we will spend a week reading and discussing many interesting facts about infinite sets and transcendental numbers. Let’s make a deal: you don’t invite me on your long cruises and I won’t insist you work out trigonometric identities with me.
Back to our trip. It is wise to go with a bunch of compatible people. Until this trip, for example, I thought that I was finally learning to get along well with my in-laws.
My mother-in-law reminded us that, on a boat, you have to accommodate yourself to the exigencies of nautical life — you must put aside your little landlubber habits, and adopt the spare ways of boating. She herself doesn’t demand that we stop at every port and get some ice for her drinks more than once every five hours. There is, when you think about it, not much difference between the cabin of a sailing boat on a long trip and a jail cell. It’s small, there’s not much privacy, daylight, or fresh air, and you can’t get out until your sentence is up.
Part Three
IN PORT: A SMALLER-THAN-USUAL ISLAND
We stopped on the beautiful island of Bequia, pronounced halfway between "Beck-way" and "Beck-wee" by the locals. This island is a part of the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which name sounds more like a religious rock group than the name of a real country. As we laboriously prepared to make lunch, it occurred to me that there are far more chores to do aboard ship than there are at home. I wonder afresh why anybody would think that sailing is something to do on a vacation. Not only are there unique, hand-busting chores (such as raising the weighty anchor by hand because the electric winch has stopped working), but you have to cook and clean in a cramped, ill-ventilated and very warm galley using miserly amounts of water. It gives new meaning to the term "galley slave".
The local radio station features island music, occasionally some local news, and presents the most important information for a sea-faring people, the "met report" on weather and sea conditions once a day. I learned from the radio that there is a breakout of Dengue fever in the Caribbean; that the St. Vincent Banana Growers’ Association is asking all the churches in St. Vincent and the Grenadines to say special prayers for the banana farmers, the association will try to get a petition with thousands of signatures in favor of bananas; in the US state of Louisiana, a robber held up a church congregation at gunpoint, making off with $1200 and a number of drivers’ licenses; there will be a HIV workshop for nurses sponsored by Planned Parenthood (which has their work cut out for them because 85% of all births here are illegitimate); you will get 2.7 $EC per $US; 20,000 Kosovars will be sent to the US Guantanamo naval base on Cuba; secondary school teachers were concerned about sexual activity between students at sports events; you can win a fabulous trip to Barbados; coverage of cricket was off because of technical difficulties, the management apologizes for any convenience [sic] caused by this.
I was reasonably clever about bringing a selection of well-thought-out items with me. My GPS unit, a recent model with maps of the Caribbean, turned out to be very handy. Navigation made easy in one tiny hand-held box. I am glad I brought a pair of binoculars, for while the boat was supplied with a pair, they were cheap and filled up with water from the rain that got into the cockpit. The rain got into the cockpit a bit more than it should have because the front curtains that had been supplied didn’t fit our boat. One of the items it never occurred to me to bring on this trip was a pair of ear-plugs. This was not to keep out the racket made by the insects and frogs that keep up a solid screeching din all night (for some reason, such natural sounds do not annoy me), but to keep out the booming disco music that played all night.
It was logical: Port Elizabeth, the city on Admiralty Bay, is a resort area, people come to resorts to party, to party you need (for reasons beyond my ken) very loud music. You could hear the music from literally miles away, even to the remotest corners of the bay. And this is not a small bay, even the hypertrophied Club Med schooner, with five masts and sails small for its ocean-liner hull, lands here. There was no escaping the thumping bass line. I could not sleep. I was miserable. To be fair, I should mention that I had been given due warning, though I took it to be hyperbole: Doyle’s "Sailor’s Guide to the Windward Islands" said that "the town anchorage throbs with music through the night."
Part Four
DINNER FOR SEVEN AT THERESA’S
Based on reading the guide book that had come with the boat, we chose Theresa’s for supper. Here’s what Doyle’s "Sailor’s Guide to the Windward Islands" said on this topic: "Theresa’s [VHF 68, $C, reservations essential], just back from the beach, is a cutely converted little rum shop and a favorite watering hole for expatriates and holiday returnees..." The handsome, professional, quarter-page, two-color ad offered "International Cuisine, Greek, Italian, Chinese, English, etc. West Indian and Vegetarian our specialties. Delightfully simple and simply delightful." Sounded good, so we grabbed the VHF radio and set it to channel 68. "Theresa’s Theresa’s, this is Windbeam." A reply came back over the aether, "This is Theresa, go to 67" So we reply "To 67" and switch to channel 67 to continue our conversation. "This is Windbeam, can you take seven for dinner at about 6:30?" "Sure." The code "$C" meant that the restaurant was on the inexpensive side. To get there, we had to call a taxi (using the VHF radio, which is sort of an island party line). By the way, we didn’t use the real name of our boat, so that listeners would not know which boat would be unoccupied, and therefore a good target for a bit of thieving. After a water-taxi ride to shore, Lency’s land taxi arrived. Lency was driving, and he had a friend sitting on the left-hand side of the front seat (the islands are right-hand steering, in the British tradition).
The taxi was a small Japanese pickup truck with a sunshade over the bed of the truck and padded benches running along both sides. Lency let down the back gate, produced a step stool, and we all climbed up and in. No seat belts. We held onto the railings with a grip we hoped would prove sufficiently strong, and began a scenic drive on very narrow roads that clung to the edges of cliffs and gave us magnificent views of the vertical drops to the harbor from above. In many places the road was delineated on both sides by vertical-sided ditches, usually over a meter in depth. At least the trip wasn’t expensive. Less than 10 dollars (US) both ways. Lency wouldn’t take any money for the trip there, he was paid after he returned (Theresa would let him know we were ready on the VHF; then we would call the water taxi with our VHF...).
We survived the trip, and there was Theresa’s. With walls of questionable verticality, unscreened openings everywhere, and a roof woven of palm strips that might have looked better when new, Theresa’s restaurant would fail to satisfy every building and hygiene code in any US city. When Doyle’s said, "cute", that was hyperbole. Picturesque, dilapidated, funky, tattered, run-down, shabby, had seen better days; those would have been appropriate descriptors. Cute it was not. A vague elderly man offered some incomprehensible observations, and then a pair of drinking buddies, one white and one black, staggered in. Theresa ordered them to leave. They argued back, and the white man lay down half blocking the door and went to sleep. Theresa made a big show of calling the police. But no police came. The black man slowly, very slowly, drifted down the short street haranguing us in a patois so thick that we could only understand every other word. We could understand every other word because it was a well-known obscenity that begins with "f".
After we had sat on the front porch for a while, watching the traffic go by (seven taxis, two private cars, and a motor scooter in the 45 minutes we waited) a young white woman breezed in on foot from the beach and said, "What would you like to drink." We had already learned that if you asked for "beer" they usually said they didn’t have any. The word means "root beer" here. You have to ask for Heineken or the local brew, Hairoun, by name. I had a bottle of Coca-Cola, which isn’t quite like Coca-Cola in the states; it is both less sweet and less fizzy, with a hint of, perhaps, lemon. But it is recognizable.
I was sorry to have to move into the back area where our table was set, because it had been fun watching the floor show: a chameleon who matched the pink-brown color of the roof snatching insects that gathered by the light over the front door. Our new seating area was graced by only an inactive toad on the lathe fence that walled us from the drainage ditch that marked the edge of the restaurant’s property.
We were not asked our choice of "Greek, Italian, Chinese, English, etc." dishes, or even shown a menu, but were presented with a meal of Theresa’s own invention. Starting with some very tasty garlic bread, we were then served perfectly and lightly cooked carrots, cauliflower, and something similar to string beans in a delicate butter sauce; a huge bowl of irresistible pan-roasted potatoes that soon disappeared; and then a plate of local fish and chicken in a traditional island sauce. Superb. A combination of local coconut, passionfruit, and chocolate ice cream was dessert.
By the time we rode back, I had become used to the open-air style taxi, and enjoyed the cool rush of air and the unimpeded views. Our water taxi met us promptly, and we were back on our boat with nary a hitch. Food in the islands can be very good. The next night, in a far more pricey restaurant, blessed by a professional decorator, a restaurant that would not have looked too out of place on a beach in California, we were served a decent but definitely inferior meal. And no drunks. I’ll take Theresa’s any time.
Part Five
THE RAIN
I’ll get ahead of my story and reveal that when our trip was completed, I discovered that we had used only half the water supply on the boat, that it would have been easy to get the water tanks refilled, and that we could have taken many showers and been far more comfortable.
It should be clear by now that I am no lover of tropical climes. I have lived where it is hot, but in those places it’s only hot in summer (except for San Francisco). Having a season for heat is an almost-acceptable excuse for such anti-social behavior on the part of the weather, but at least the summers where I have lived have been punctuated by rain, and with the rain usually comes some measure of relief from the heat. And so it was, that as I tried to sleep in the cloistered cabin below (my daughters having appropriated the cockpit where I have been getting some fresh air at night) a cool breeze came up, and some gentle rain began to fall.
I immediately learned the wisdom of putting opening windows on walls rather than on the roof, as we do on land. Our source of air in the cabin was a window, just big enough for an adult to squeeze through, in the ceiling. I had, up to then, relished the fitful bits of air that had made it through the tiny portal, but now clouds obscured the narrow view of the southern constellations, and rain was landing directly on my face. The even tinier windward-side porthole was spitting rain in, and I had to close both. Leaving them open a crack meant that instead of rain, a water-torture style slow drip fell on my head. Thus, instead of a welcome cooling, rain, I learned, meant a closed, stuffy, and hotter-than-ever cabin. With 100 percent humidity guaranteed.
The next rain was nastier. Our uniform weather was over. By extreme good fortune, I was able to get a weather report that morning and learned that the storm rated a small craft warning, with seas of two meters or more. Giving this information to the skipper, he wisely insisted that we should remove the motor and fuel tank from the inflatable rubber dingy that dogged the boat on the end of its leash, and made sure that we had two painters tied on. Items on board were secured with extra care, and we began the relatively long crossing between islands somewhat later than we had anticipated.
It was not long afterward that my wife noticed that most of the dingy was gone. One of the two painters had parted, and the other was whole, with a handle of the boat still attached. So there we were, in a rising sea, on a ship the captain had told us was barely seaworthy, and without a lifeboat. Risking derision, I put on a life jacket, and insisted that our seven-year-old do the same. I suggested this precaution to everybody else, but there were no takers.
By the standards of the southern ocean, and the hairy stories of seamanship amidst waves that towered above the tops of the masts of the great clippers, our storm was mild. But in a boat with less than a meter of freeboard (the distance the deck sits above the waterline), two meter waves mean getting soaked with every plunge. And plunge we did. And rise. And plunge. And rise. And plunge. I made the mistake of taking a snooze below in these conditions, and woke suddenly with a desperate feeling of nausea. For the one and only time in my life, I was seasick. Dashing up to the cockpit, I hung over the stern and made sea-monster noises (according to my young daughter) as I consigned the acidified remains of my lunch to the deep. I was instantly cured, and felt fine again after rinsing out my mouth (wasting, again, a bit of our precious water supply). Both my daughters looked a bit green. Actually, a lot green. Neither moved very much on this leg of the trip.
On second thought, maybe my sea-sickness was a result of the smoked oysters on which we snacked an hour after brunch. The smoked oysters were the result of a puzzling, Captain Queeg kind-of scene that had happened earlier. My son Aza is very fond of smoked oysters, and there was a tin of them on board. My mother-in-law, Sandy, offered some to him at brunch, but Aza was not hungry at the time (we had just eaten) and the tin stayed closed.
It took us a few hours to prepare the ship for the anticipated rough seas, and toward the end of that time Aza went to open the oysters, and my mother-in-law curtly dismissed the idea. "Too much of a mess it’ll make" said Sandy. Aza and I were puzzled, because, earlier, she had suggested that he open the oysters. At that time we were still in the harbor, where the sea was calm.
We were still further amazed when, after we had been tossed about for an hour, with another four or five hours of heavy weather to look forward to, Sandy suddenly announced that she had somehow opened the oysters, and that the open tin was (appetizingly?) in the sink. Instead of toothpicks, which we did not have, she had put wooden matches (active side up, fortunately) into some of the oysters. Nobody felt like eating anything in those heavy seas, but Aza gamely tried a few, and I had two myself. But I have never figured out why, at that dreadful and ungustatory moment, she chose to open them. In the event, nobody else volunteered to eat any, and not having a suitable means of storage, we simply threw out the rest of them.
...
Hours later, when safely in port, my mother-in-law spontaneously began a frank discussion of the merits of sailing with me. She explained nothing about the oyster incident (and I didn’t ask), but revealed her secret for enduring life as a sailor’s wife. She said, sipping her well-iced glass of vodka and V-8, "It’s not much fun if you don’t drink."
I’m a teetotaler.
Part Six
BANG
Near Soufriére stands one of the most striking geological features of the Caribbean islands, the Pitons. A pair of narrow volcanic intrusions, they tower thousands of feet above the water, marking two ends of an entrancing bay. A $900-per-night hotel complex takes up most of the sandy beach. At the base of the smaller piton (Petit Piton; the big one is Gros Piton) is an underwater nature preserve where the snorkeling is unexcelled. Bang in the middle of the pitons is an eccentric restaurant called Bang In The Middle of the Pitons. Nothing could be easier to find, as the pitons can be seen from 50 miles away on a clear day. Locally, the restaurant is known simply as Bang. It is run by Lord Glencarron, a genuine Scottish lord who is rumored to be quite wealthy — once he gave Princess Margaret a gift of a large estate on the island of Mustique. At the time, he and his group owned the whole island. I have heard that they still own most of it.
Now, however, he prefers to dress in white pants, a loose-flowing white shirt, and a white straw hat, wandering about his restaurant talking to the hoi polloi and directing the help. We first saw his slow-moving and ghostly figure from the boat. The restaurant is largely provisioned from the farms he owns that lie on the land between and around the pitons. Because the book says that it is $C (VHF 68), we figured we could afford to eat there. Due to the self-serving efforts of an especially pleasant local water-taxi operator named Mervin, we had a mooring very close to the restaurant.
We were seated in an outdoor pavilion near the kitchen, which looks like a Disneyland interpretation of a Caribbean building. However, the openwork here was all real, intended to let in the fickle breezes. A chameleon climbed the wall. A good size patio was circled by covered outdoor tables, and a fancier covered area looked ready to receive some musicians. A large stone sat where you might expect a drummer; we speculated that perhaps it was part of a rock band.
Our waitress came by to take drink orders; she turned out to be Mervin’s sister, Pearl. Her mood seemed especially labile, friendly one instant, brusque the next. After we were sipping our lemonades, rum punches, and vodkas (you know who), and sampling the appetizer which consisted of salted, roasted strips of local coconuts (a very tasty alternative to chips, enjoyed even by me, who usually dislikes coconut), Lord Glencarron himself came by. He was very apologetic, telling us that the fish had not yet arrived, and that if we wished to wait for about a half hour, he was expecting some.
The grandparents were all for ordering from the rest of the brief menu, but for once I asserted myself, suggesting that we try the fish puff appetizers (warmly recommended in the guide book, and pleasant morsels in fact) and be patient. A half hour later a pickup truck, of the kind that is readily converted into an island taxi, arrived, laden with boxes of beverages. It didn’t drive up to some back door via an alley. No way. It drove right across the patio, between the tables, to the kitchen door.
After the drinks were unloaded, a few huge fish, just caught, were taken from the truck and carried into the kitchen. With the head of each fish at the level of the head of the driver, the tail was at his calf; and he wasn’t a short man. He carried in one fish at a time, which was a not inconsiderable load. Lord Glencarron came over to tell us the obvious: Fish was on. I won’t describe the meal further, except to say that it was a minor feast and that the fish was tasty and perfectly done.
Our skipper’s preoccupation with sailing as the daily activity of choice forced us to miss many of the more interesting features of the islands we circumnavigated. For example, St. Lucia offers caves, a zoo, petroglyphs, historical and archaeological sites, historical interpretive parks, tours of working sugar and cocoa mills, rain forests, bird-watching sites, boat builders, horse trails; and places you can observe sea-turtles, dolphins, and whales. There is also an interesting capital city of Casties and a number of towns. Except for the warm waterfall, we saw none of them. The island of St. Lucia also has many shopping centers catering to tourists. We didn’t see those either, but for this I was grateful. Federal disclosure rules for essayists force me to admit that we did zip through Casties on our way to the airport for the trip home. After sailing the Caribbean for a week, Casties seems very metropolitan, with traffic lights and a grid of busy streets.
As we drove down from the mountains with the city below us I was puzzled by the inordinately huge size of an ocean liner or cruise ship that was sitting at the Casties city dock. It towered over the tallest downtown buildings, and reached halfway across the city. Though I have been on nearly kilometer-long container boats and seen the USS Enterprise atomic-powered aircraft carrier in dry dock in San Francisco, I had never seen anything as large as this! How could such an immense vessel have escaped my attention? Suddenly, I realized that it was not that the boat was so big, but that the city is so small that the cruise ship could dominate the skyline. One block in Casties is about a third of what I am used to as a block, the streets are often the width of a good sidewalk in the US, and the buildings are scaled accordingly. This accounted for the illusion of a super-large ship.
One problem with dinner that I have not yet mentioned was something that I had almost forgotten about: How quickly the cheap smell of cigarette smoke could destroy the enjoyment of good food (the rich smell of cigars has a similar effect). A number of times what pleasure we could eke out from our circumstances was further spoiled by a nearby smoker lighting up. Public smoking has become so rare in California as to make its prevalence in other places painfully apparent. The situation used to be especially painful on airplanes, as there was no way to get away from the cigarette smoke. While I believe that people should be allowed to be as stupid as they wish with regard to smoking, the laws that prevent them from inflicting their acrid effluvia on me are just and were long overdue.
Part Seven
THE REALITY AND THE REAL VACATION
As we traveled around the islands at our glacial pace, I often wondered what could be done to relieve the evident poverty. Not that small, informal houses and a lack of the electronic amenities, clothing styles, automobiles, and material abundance that characterize the middle and upper classes in our country is a sign of poverty. There are many ways of being rich that do not depend on possessions and access to supermarkets full to excess with unneeded luxuries. However, our culture does advertise these goods and services in every magazine, movie and TV show we dispense, and thereby stirs longings for equity. That so many of us have the leisure and resources to visit the islands, and that when we leave can afford to give away a month’s island wages worth of leftover food to whomever is standing around, highlights our relative positions. With the kindness of offering food comes the unspoken and unintended, but inescapable, insult of inherent inequality. They can make no comparable gift to us, as any person with honor and pride would wish to do.
Even without the example of our life style to look up to or down at, it is hard to be content and fulfilled when there is no meaningful work to be had, or any future utility to a broad education. This is so even if you can live off the bounty of the land and do not need to work to survive (not that I am suggesting that this is the case).
The islands are remote and small enough so that bringing industry that seeks cheap labor is no answer — shipping eats into the advantage. More significantly, while such work yields few paths to joy or wealth for the islanders; it brings every advantage to the owners and to foreign consumers. There is, however, a small hope in the growth of facile, inexpensive (especially if subsidized by the rich countries), computer communications such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. If I can work from home, as I do, I could equally work from the islands and, more importantly, so could islanders (or any third world population). Programming, design, web services, and much more are well paid and open to anyone, anywhere, who has the requisite training and even relatively minimal equipment (which, at first, should be donated). Low cost, worldwide communication is a key to economic viability, and it need not threaten the ecology, so that tourism would continue to be a source of revenue, and pleasure.
I found it disturbing to be in the role of the rich American, which only added to my many other discomforts. I did not feel like taking pictures of the people. For example, as I walked through a village I saw a very obese woman washing clothes, later I saw her carrying the washing in three parcels, one under each arm and the third balanced on her head. It was a National Geographic photo, with a man behind her taking a long daught from what appeared to be a bottle of liquor. All in all, an image of exotic poverty and ruin against the fecund palms and hills of the island. I felt that to have raised a camera would have been an invasion of privacy.
Escape from purgatory came only after standing in a hot, slow, cigarette-smoke-infiltrated, line at the airport. Modern computer procedures at airline counters, as inefficient as they might seem to be to the harried traveler, work in far slower motion when their endless strings of digits must be entered by hand into an encyclopedic array of forms at an outdoor counter in a breezeless tropical airport in the middle of the day.
We flew to Puerto Rico in an enjoyably small, two-engined, propeller-driven aircraft. The wing was on top, so the view below was unrestricted and through larger windows than those available on jets. In keeping with the nature of the trip, the cloud cover was complete from the moment we took off from St. Lucia and continued as solid overcast as we flew up the chain of islands to Puerto Rico. There was nothing to be seen from my prized window seat. The airport at Puerto Rico is vast, empty, devoid of restaurants that might offer the local cuisine, and not worth writing about. Some of my high school years were spent in a Puerto Rican ghetto on Long Island, NY, where my parent’s store was located, and I grew to have an appreciation for the food and the music. But this air-conditioned, antiseptic airport offered services as bland as those you might find in Des Moines, Albany, or Sacramento.
Due to superb planning, our stopover in Puerto Rico wasn’t quite a full five hours. Just as we were getting to know the airport really well, it was time to go to New York. At JFK, a van was waiting to take us to Scarsdale, where we slept overnight at my in-laws house (it was so good to take a long, warm, soapy shower). Then we took a six hour drive in a borrowed car to Pine Grove Mills, Pennsylvania for an evening and overnight stay with a dear friend and his wife. We left the children and in-laws in New York City, so that my wife and I, who rarely have the opportunity to enjoy each other’s company, were on our own. It was this evening and the following morning with our friends that formed the only real vacation we had on the trip, a few happy hours before being thrown into another maelstrom.
Part Eight
PENN STATE
From Pine Grove Mills to State College is a drive of only a few miles, you go past the State Pen and, a few minutes later, get to Penn State. I had to go to The Pennsylvania State University because I had graduated therefrom, and said institution had decided that I was one of the year’s "10 Outstanding Engineering Graduates", the highest honor the college of engineering bestows, presumably on those who the University hopes might endow a chair or donate a building. Unfortunately, I am not in that economic class, but they weren’t aware of this shortcoming of mine.
My memories of Penn State are generally fond ones, probably because my stay was short and I avoided the football games. Much of the material I learned there was interesting and, miraculously, has proved useful over the years. Judging from the thoughts and actions of many people I know who also have higher degrees, this is more than one usually gets from a formal education.
Like the other 9 honorees, I was to attend a few days of dinners, meetings, photographic sessions, and a fancy shindig at which we’d be given plaques and get to shake the hand of the dean of the college of engineering. Unlike the other 9, however, I alone was to give a public talk, advertised in the local papers and on the air. I had tried to write this talk when floating about in the Caribbean, but the light shining on the screen of my portable computer made it unreadable in the daytime, and the press of constantly-talking family made writing difficult any time. Besides, you are not supposed to get sweat or seawater into your keyboard. The salt corrodes the contacts. These circumstances also destroyed my hopes to spend a good portion of the trip working on a book I’m writing.
Because of the difficulties of working on board the boat, I was not really prepared for my first talk (to a computer science class) or for my second, public, talk. The second talk got moved, at the last minute, to a room devoid of any kind of projection devices, so even my few planned images were unavailable. It is easy to make fun of the solemnities we endured, well suited to a Gilbert and Sullivan spoof; but there is something righteous in such an honor, a bit of the I-told-you-so, a touch of Mark Twain’s delight at having a character listen in at his own funeral, and the gratification of having your alma mater acknowledge your superiority to a degree that almost comes up to your own inflated opinion of yourself. For me, this was a double whammy of affirmation, because my undergraduate school had similarly honored me as one if its 40 all-time outstanding graduates six months earlier. Who among us has not felt, as a student, that our potential was underappreciated by our school? You wish you could show the award to that prof who always gave you Ds.
Fortunately, the muse struck me as I stood in front of the audience and with her help I managed to give what I was told was an entertaining and provocative talk. I deviated wildly from my plans, and, mercifully, I have no idea of what I said. Later, when being photographed in a formal pose where the dean of engineering, Dr. Wormley, was supposedly handing me my plaque, I deliberately held the plaque upside down, thinking that this might make the photo a bit more interesting than average, but the photographer caught it, and had me turn it rightside up. Uniformity is better than originality.
After the last dessert had been eaten, after the last congratulation offered, and after a brief night at the college’s own hotel (run by hotel majors, which explains why our room-service breakfast came without utensils—they have bigger issues on their minds), it was back to NY, pick up the kids, rush to a plane, and zoom home.
The ordeal was over. Now, all I needed was a vacation.